Manzanar

As I mentioned the other day, we did a day excursion last week to Manzanar, one of about a dozen Japanese internment camps which were open during World War II. Manzanar is near the town of Lone Pine, California, in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. There’s a guard tower and some reconstructed barracks which are supposed to resemble the ones present in the 1940s. There is also a plaque describing the site, which, quite uncharacteristically for the National Park Service, describes internment clearly as a mistake and a demonstration of inhumanity. Because of this, the plaque has been cut with knives and shot multiple times, and another plaque has been posted on the private land directly behind it affirming the courage of American soldiers.

Seeing the site reminded me quite a bit of my visit to a slave fort in Cape Coast, Ghana. There, thousands of captive Africans waited packed like cattle in tiny, dark and filthy rooms, until they boarded a ship for a journey across the Atlantic which one-third of them would not survive. Japanese internment isn’t quite as unfathomable in its scale and inhumanity, but it still brought tears to my eyes to think about the things we’ve done to fellow people during the worst moments of our history. I read several pages of the visitor’s log, and there were several entries which said something like, “This is my first visit to Manzanar since I was released in 1945.” What really got to me was the exhibit about Japanese soldiers during World War II, including one man who dove on top of grenade to prevent it from killing his entire squad. He was killed and awarded a medal for valor, while his mother and the rest of his family was locked up in Manzanar.

I realized, walking around there, that so much of our history involves fencing away things we don’t like. The West especially has been defined and controlled by fences. Systematically murder Native Americans, then fence the once who survive in reservations. Dam rivers, fence them into reservoirs, so Los Angeles and Las Vegas can continue to grow. Put Japanese people in camps during the war because they might hurt the war effort. Anything contrary to growth, Manifest Destiny, war, America or God, we put inside a neat little fence and forget about. And now, it’s gotten to the point where we fence off the things we want to preserve. Fence the stream so cattle can’t trample the willow and aspen. Fence off the vegetation so it can keep growing undisturbed. Fence off Yellowstone and Yosemite to assuage our guilt as we mine uranium and clear cut forests everywhere else on our public lands.

I hope that we can take a lesson from history and never do this again, but our reactions to 9/11 suggest otherwise. Still, I hope next time we’re confronted with a crisis of national security, our first reaction isn’t to deprive people of their Constitutional rights.

Night in the desert

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

I love this time of night in the desert. Or semi-desert, since I’m surrounded by National Forest land and cowpies. I feel like I’m seeing a whole other world, being awake after everyone else is in bed. It feels like this is when life is truly still, relaxed, with no expectations. Right now, I could be anyone. I can go for a walk, read, pee in the middle of an open field. In the city, anywhere where humans have permanently settles, this time brings anxiety more than anything. Step outside and you risk encounters with potential rapists, murderers, drunk homeless men, drunk frat boys and police. Here, I’m safe—it might rain and I might smell like cow shit, but I know I’ll be alive in the morning.

Grazing policy with Mary O'Brien

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s grazed.

Once again, we talk about grazing. It’s crazy how we get so invested and involved in these problems that it’s hard to see scale. We’re busy discussing ways to make public lands ranching sustainable and public lands only produce 2 or 3% of American beef. I find this issue more interesting than almost anything else except water rights because it involves so many issues—ecology, politics, economics, cultural myths, American history, land management…it seems like one giant puzzle. Mary asked why we’re willing to ask so many questions about how to preserve grazing but not about how to preserve sage grouse or riparian habitat. Partly, I think it’s that intersection—not just ecology, but so many things to think about. Though that’s true of habitats too; it’s not just science, there’s advocacy and politics and legal precedent that all get mixed in. So why do we care about ranchers? Anthropocentrism—I feel more for hardworking American left jobless than a sage grouse who can’t find enough to eat. Partly, I don’t think I have a sense of urgency—unlike climate change or water shortages, I don’t see much in the way of serious consequences on a larger scale. I don’t live here, but I do have to live with the laws passed by the Republicans ranchers vote for because they think my camp is anti-ranching. That’s a very selfish and probably incomplete analysis, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not entirely wrong.

Choosing a career

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: A group of paleobotanists were camped near us, so after a hard day of vegetation transects, we visited their camp at night to talk about their work excavating dinosaurs in the area.

Paleobotany seems so cool. No, that’s a lie. Digging up dinosaurs sounds cool. It reminds me of being a little kid, when I read each issue of Dig and Muse with bated breath, trying to decide if I’d rather dig up ancient civilizations or dinosaurs. That was also when I figured I could do one of those things for a year or two, then switch to something different—before I really understood what grad school was. I love meeting people who are experts in their fields and who are so knowledgeable and passionate about their work, but I can’t help feeling like I’m too young to choose. I want the freedom I had at five back. I was going to fight fires, lead expeditions to find artifacts from the Titanic, study chimps in the jungles of East Africa, unearth dinosaurs and be a mom. And damn it, I was going to be world famous for all of it! I feel simultaneously too old and too young to have this amount of freedom. So many of my peers from high school are studying so specifically, to become architects, physical therapists and writers. I’m dating a civil engineer, and the best I can offer when asked about my future is that I’d like to do the Peace Corps and have a job where I’m helping the planet not die and get to be outside. I have a major I’m not even sure about—I love politics, and I follow elections the way some people follow football or March Madness—but I don’t want an office job, I couldn’t be happy as a lawyer and I hate dressing up. I went to the DNC, I’ve seen politics from the inside, and I know that’s not me. I’d rather be a scientist or journalist during the week and an activist and community member when I can. But I still want it all. We have yet to meet anyone who works in a lab synthesizing biodegradable compounds to replace plastics and also writes for High Country News. Plus, climbing on the weekends. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to pick, and I feel like it’s easier to study science and do into journalism or advocacy or policy than to study policy and end up a wolf biologist. Which I also want to do. When am I supposed to figure this out? And how have so many other people beaten me to it?

I have a feeling none of this is what I’m supposed to write about. Vegetation transects were cool, though a bit tedious. I love knowing what plants are. Greasebush tastes pretty cool, too—very distinctive, like a not-quite-ripe blueberry in a good way. I wonder from reading the study about voles—how many other ecosystems could be fixed or greatly improved by something so simple and non-invasive? I love the idea of managing by leaving something alone or removing stressors, but not actively killing invasive species. It seems much more cautious and healthy, and at least here, it’s working, which is great. I love it when progress seems so clear and attainable.

Quenching LA's thirst

So I’ve been so busy writing I haven’t gotten a chance to say what we’re actually doing. Currently, I’m near Escalante, Utah starting week two of our field ecology course. I don’t know what exactly we’re doing, research-wise, but here’s a sample sentence from our reading, which we have a test on later in the week: The differentiation of tillering mode, whether extra or intravaginal, may have been in itself a seminal event in the evolution of grasses in response to ungulate interaction.

That’s right, people: we’re learning about grass vaginas. I didn’t even know grass had vaginas. And that’s among the easier-to-understand points in the article, which is eighteen pages. It’s going to be another late (post-10pm) night.

Up until yesterday, we were hanging out in the Eastern Sierras being inspired by mountain epicness. When we weren’t writing, we had meetings with a variety of people about water issues in the Mono Lake and Owens Lake areas. It’s a pretty interesting history, so I’ll summarize it here.

Mono and Owens Lakes are both terminal lakes, as is the Great Salt Lake. They have no streams flowing out of them, which means they’re very salty, alkaline and full of minerals. Because of this, they’re inhospitable to most life, including fish, but very important for a few select species. Mono Lake is home to a species of brine shrimp found nowhere else on earth. Owens Lake has several creatures evolved to tolerate the salt and alkalinity of the lake. But the selling point of the lakes is the important role they play in bird migration. They’re incredibly important stops for birds en route to South America for the winter and back north in the summer. Birds will arrive and double their body weight in a matter of days feasting on shrimp and other creatures in the lakes. Some species of birds stop at one of the lakes, eat, then continue on to Bolivia without stopping.

Meanwhile, several hours away, a large city called Los Angeles was growing. Since LA was built in the middle of a desert, they’ve always had water issues. In 1913, the city completed construction of an aqueduct which took virtually all of the water out of the streams feeding Owens Lake. By 1924, the lake was completely dry and the birds that relied on it were gone. In 1941, the aqueduct was extended to take water out of the streams feeding Mono Lake, and by 1982, the lake had lost 31% of its surface area.

LA’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) was taken to court by a grassroots group called the Mono Lake Committee, and in 1994 a judge ruled they had to allow enough water into the lake to let it rise 20 feet. So far, it has risen nine, and significant bird recovery has already been observed. Owens Lake has also been somewhat recovered after a compromise between DWP and activists. However, it will never again occupy its former area.

LA has been a leading city in conserving water over the years, and they now use scarcely more than they did in the 1970s, in spite of a population growth of about a million people. I’m really grateful that conservation efforts have been undertaken and that DWP was able to compromise with activists. But I worry about how long these cities in the middle of deserts can be sustainable. Invariably, the populations of Phoenix, LA, and Las Vegas will continue to grow. Climate change is causing glaciers to melt and the reservoirs that feed them to evaporate faster. Once all possible water conservation has been implemented, what will these cities do?

Many environmentalists (and other analysts) have predicted future wars will be fought over water, and I suspect they’re very right. I wonder if these cities will hang on stubbornly, propelled by the fact that they’re situated in the richest country on earth. We have the military might necessary to secure water rights wherever we need them if it truly comes to that, though I doubt it will. Maybe desalinization technology will keep advancing until it’s cheap enough to let LA grow forever. I hope we go that route (cheap technology, hopefully not LA growing forever). But I worry. Water is recycled, yes, but it’s a finite resource in some senses. Only a certain amount can be used at a time. Groundwater is rapidly being depleted worldwide and the aquifers we pump from can take thousands of years to recharge, making them a very finite resource. We might solve climate change, and ignoring all the arguments about environmental justice and the right of species to exist (both of which are very important issues), some people somewhere will survive climate change relatively unscathed. But we truly can’t live without water, and in some ways, water shortage worries me more than a hotter planet (though the latter obviously contributes to the former).

I’m looking forward to learning more about water in the West, though. And yes, I know I need to read Cadillac Desert (currently on page 20).

We also went to Manzanar, a former Japanese internment camp, while we were in the Sierras, and I hope to write about that in the next few days.

The importance of water

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

I feel like I’ve been so busy writing I haven’t had time to journal. I wish we had a longer segment on water, though I suspect it will come up again. Water and grazing seem to me to be the defining political issues of the West—almost everything else that gets people riled up can be tied back to one of those things.

I read books about dams—A Story That Stands Like a Dam over the summer, and now I’m starting Cadillac Desert. I find it so hard to imagine growing up in a world where there was no environmental conscience, yet I look at and listen to the Reclamation boys and politicians during the dam-building frenzy and I have to conclude they had no sense of looking at ecosystems or of seeing things in a way not tied to human industry and profit. Even the conservationists saw wildness and wilderness as spiritual refuge for men, a place not to be civilization, a place to calm our troubled and overworked souls. I don’t think the word salmon was mentioned once in the things I read, though I’m also not sure they live in the Colorado. But some other animal, plant, ecological function must have been imperiled when they closed the floodgates in Page. Why did no Rachel Carson spring up? Or if they did, why did history not remember them? I suppose the movement had to progress in a certain way. Maybe no one could conceive of ecology until we’d idolized wilderness as a spiritual refuge. Maybe no one thought to listen for the birds or count the salmon. But I have a hard time believing that’s the case. Native Americans, who fished the salmon, knew runs were declining precipitously, and so did other in the Northwest. And I don’t know enough about the ecology of Glen Canyon to say what anyone noticed when.

I’m worried about water, though. More than climate change, though of course they’re related. Some people somewhere will do just fine on a hotter planet, and because I’m among the rich and the privileged, because I live at 48˚N, I will be saved. Not that it’s not important to fight and mitigate, and not that we shouldn’t all be thinking about climate justice. But I’ve never felt that fear or panic that I’m supposed to. Where I get that fear is water, and once again I’m grateful to be on the west of the mountains. But Cali makes my food, and it does so artificially, pretending it’s not a desert by drawing on the Colorado and irreplaceable groundwater. When there’s not enough water to irrigate California, what do I eat? When we run out of topsoil from erosion, where will my food grow? These are the things that keep me up at night. Climate change will accelerate them, too. We can survive heat, tornadoes, hurricanes, cold winters. But we need water to live.

Playing with fire

After a week of writing in the Sierra Nevada mountains, we had to come up with an epiphany—a personal essay about something we’ve learned or realized on Semester in the West. We spent all of today reading them out loud to each other, and it’s been fantastically interesting to hear what everyone’s been thinking about. Here’s mine.


Playing With Fire

In Wallowa County, I saw a forest that wasn’t a forest. A century of fire suppression had created a dense understory, with Grand Fir shrubs blanketing the floor and threatening to overshadow the pines. With nature left to its own devices, lightning strikes would have reduced the green brush to ash, nourishing the soil and triggering a release of seeds from the seratenous cones of the lodgepole pines. In the forest, devastation gives way to new life. Nature is a phoenix, constantly being reborn and reinvented after each blaze.

Humans, naturally, are uncomfortable with fires. Fires leave charred landscapes in their wake, interrupting our serene nature walks with the intrusion of death. More often than not, people who claim to love nature means that they love lush riparian vegetation or snow-covered alpine slopes. Fires burning out of control threaten safety and aesthetics. We want the wild, yes, but we want it safe for RVs, families, wheelchairs, God and scenic photos.

The Forest Service has come to recognize fire is needed, but also knows that uncontrolled, it poses a danger to human communities. Current policy in Wallowa-Whitman National Forest is to suppress all fires immediately unless they’re in a wilderness area. Forest management includes fuel removal and prescribed burns designed to mimic the effects of natural fires.

I saw several forests that had been treated to reduce fire danger during our stay in Wallowa County. Although they looked healthy, they concept of “managing” nature makes me uneasy. Past attempts to control nature and make it “better” have included hunting wolves to extinction in the lower 48 and building enough dams on the Columbia to make salmon passage nearly impossible. Underlying management is the assumption that we understand how ecosystems function, even though our knowledge is a process, constantly being changed, revised, updated and contradicted. Current strategies focus on restoring balance to the natural world rather than exploiting it for human use, changing us from blind destroyers to benevolent engineers. Though this outlook is an improvement, it relies on the unspoken assumption that we are separate from, different than and above nature. We have the power to bend natural forces to our will. We can put out fires, dam rivers, kill off and then reintroduce wolves. We are gods, and trees, bison, rivers, salmon and wolves are mere mortals.

Practically speaking, letting fires run their course is impossible. There is too much wood to let it all burn, too many people living nearby to risk a full-scale forest fire. Humans have sought to change nature and bend it to our will as long as we have existed, and controlling fire is no exception. But I see a separation in our current management that troubles me. A farmer, rancher or homesteader putting out a forest fire does so for immediate personal reasons—their entire livelihood will be reduced to ashes unless they act. They live with nature, aware of its destructive potential, but also know that it sustains them. The Forest Service putting out all fires as a matter of policy strikes me less as an act of self-preservation and more as a capitulation to the timber industry, which would rather not lose valuable board-feet, and to tourists, who would rather not see charred plant skeletons during their sojourns in Eden.

In the natural world, beauty and destruction dance dangerously around each other, opposing forces that could not exist independently. There are no snow-covered mountains without crevasses and avalanches. The sleek fur of a wolf is nourished by the blood and bone marrow of elk, slaughtered out of necessity and with indifference. The healthy forests which support thousands of reptiles, insects, shrubs, mammals and trees would cease to exist without fire. We cannot have one without the other. A farmer understands that the rains which nourish his crops today can bring floods which destroy his house tomorrow. A city dweller who backpacks during summer weekends may not understand that the blackened trees he sees are necessary to sustain the green forest he finds so beautiful.

Forested lands are managed for multiple uses, including timber, mining, grazing and recreation. I would ask only that habitat be added to this list, as an equal consideration. Natural communities have a right to exist, a right which must be weighed against the rights people claim to cut down trees, suppress fires and otherwise control nature for their own benefit. A healthy, functioning ecosystem includes periodic fires; if we suppress all fires, we deny trees the opportunity to thrive and animals the chance to live in a balanced ecosystem.

I do not believe fires should never be put out. People living in and near forests are understandably concerned about their homes, property and livelihood. However, people need to be realistic about the risks inherent in living by forests before they build vacation homes in the middle of wild areas. Fires can and do happen. Firefighters should not be expected to risk their lives for a house which was unwisely placed in an at-risk area, or for the future profit a private timber corporation hopes to make off of public lands. Some fires may need to be put out for public safety, but others can and should be left to burn.

The Oldest Tree on Earth

A few days ago, we got to go to the bristlecone pines groves high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. These gnarled trees are the oldest on earth, with some dated to about 4900 years. Hiking around at 10,000 feet, I remembered a story I’d read a while ago about the oldest tree on earth being cut down after a researcher got a tree corer stuck in the tree. I did some research and talked to the ranger, and discovered that tree was another bristlecone in Great Basin National Park. Because that tree was cut, the oldest living tree on Earth is now here, in the Sierra Nevada, a mere two miles from where we were. Our task was to write something as we pondered the bristlecones, so here’s what I came up with.


The Oldest Tree on Earth

When I was nine, I read a story in Muse about a researcher who cut down the oldest tree on Earth. Trying to age the bristlecone pine, his tree corer had gotten stuck, and the Forest Service gave him permission to kill the tree to retrieve his equipment. When the tree had fallen, its age was finally revealed. Reading the story, I put down my magazine, fighting back tears as I wondered about the thing we choose to value.

Now, as I see these ancient trees for the first time, I realize the story I read tells more than I originally thought. Suppose the corer had gotten stuck in another tree, not quite so old, perhaps a younger sibling. The trunk would have succumbed to the same chainsaw, the thousand dollar piece of equipment saved from its entrails. No one would have seen fit to write an elegy for a tree only 4000 years old, not quite holding the all-important record. The incident would have been written off, forgotten. No one mourns the second-best.

Still, my mind tries to fathom the sequence of events that ranked a mass-produced piece of scientific equipment above one of the oldest trees on Earth, for surely the Forest Service was not ignorant of the age bristlecones live to. Where were the conservationists and concerned citizens offering to donate money to replace the corer? Where was the conscience of the student, the bureaucrat who once loved trees before he was trained to see them as a commodity? How do so many of us, knowing trees are alive, refuse to see them as living? Some loggers have sworn they’ve heard trees scream as they’re pulled from their roots, torn apart and hacked into pieces.

Walking through the bristlecones, I take pictures. Frame after frame, taking and taking with tears in my heart because I have nothing to give. I wonder what these trees have seen over the years. I wonder if any of them screamed when they lost their oldest brother. I want to apologize for hubris and capitalism, but it is not my apology to give, nor theirs to accept. I walk on, my heart heavy, and I hear nothing bul silence from the oldest trees on Earth.

Conquest and civilization

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: near Lone Pine, CA

context: We visited Manzanar, which was an internment camp during World War II for thousands of Japanese-Americans. It’s now a National Historical Site, sitting in the shadow of the Sierra-Nevada mountains.

When will we ever learn? I’ve been to Cape Coast, Ghana, seen the fortresses where thousands of Africans lived like cattle before setting off to cross the sea. One-third would never set foot on American shores. This land, before it was home to whites keeping Japanese-Americans prisoner, belonged to the Paiutes, just as the rest of the West belonged to people with no concept of owning the space between ground and sky.

The history of Western Civilization is written in conquest. I reap the benefits; I don’t want the guilt. My legacy is written with barbed wire, chains, whips and blankets full of smallpox. We declare grand conquests—conquer the plains and prairies, Manifest Destiny—and fence off, lock up, kill and bury anything and anyone that stands in the way. We put things in boxes—this is nature, this is where cattle graze. This is (white) America, this is your reservation.

How can I apologize for actions I never chose? How can I justify the benefits in my life that have come at the expense of another’s freedom, self-determination or life?

Managing nature

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lone Pine, California

We seek to control nature, but we’ve forgotten how to live here. In ignorance and with hubris, we slaughtered the wolves and drove away the beavers. We took fires out of forests and replaced them with prescribed burns. We plowed prairies, killed the bison and planted wheat, assuming the rain would follow. When it didn’t, we damned and diverted rivers to feed cities in the middle of deserts.

It’s not that people have never changed nature. But we’ve never done it on this scale with this attitude. Native Americans set fires and built dams, but they also understood themselves as part of the natural world. They knew that a relationship based on taking what they could from the earth would not be sustainable.

Our culture is beginning to understand this. We know wolves are needed for functional ecosystems, so we’re reintroducing them. We write Environmental Impact Statements to get funding to burn parts of forest which should have been left to burn naturally. Some people are even starting to talk about taking down the dams.

These solutions will help restore ecosystems. They are vital, necessary and absolutely should be done. But they still leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Can we truly restore nature without learning to live in balance with it? If the extent of our land ethic is that we go from ignorant destroyers to benevolent engineers, what are we telling ourselves about our relationship to nature?

I think back to a book I read called Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening From the Nightmare of Zoos. The author, Derrick Jensen spoke about the human cruelty and arrogance which underscores the idea of a zoo. Living in a cage, an animal loses its soul, its wild essence. You may go up to the bars, see the sign telling you you’re looking at a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos, or a wolf, Canis lupus. But until you’ve seen that animal in the wild, where it was born, where is knows how to life—you’ve never really seen a bear or a wolf. You’ll always be looking at a shadow, a prisoner.

I think back to Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and it seems like a similar shadow. We’ve taken something wild—a forest—and tamed it to suit our needs. We preserve it under multiple use, but somehow habitat and intrinsic value never make it on the list. We’ve been doing this for so long that no one in living memory knows what the forest was like before cows came and industrial timber took over.

I know it’s naive and idealistic, but I want that forest back. I want our land ethic back, one based on balance and give and take, not rape, pillage and plunder. We need practical solutions to problems, so for the moment, I accept the need for radio collars, prescribed burns and fuel reduction. But we’re going to need more than that to carry us through in the long run. We’re going to need girls growing up knowing the plants two jackrabbits might eat if they got hungry hiking through a desert covered in sagebrush*. We’re going to need grandparents teaching their grandchildren to hunt deer and make jam out of wild blackberries. We’re going to need people willing to work hard to take care of themselves, people who are ok being a little too war, or cold and walking places they need to go. None of this will be easy. This isn’t about fifty simple things you can do to save the earth. It’s not even about fifty difficult things. It’s nothing less than a shift in the entire way we perceive our relationship to the natural world. We’re not gods, and we’re not meant to control everything. The sooner we accept that, the more likely it is that earth will survive with us.

*This was a reference to an essay that writer Michael Branch read to us at his home in Reno, Nevada, where we camped for a night. The essay was published in the January/February 2011 issue of Orion and can be found here.